Trimersion Virtual Reality

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Trimersion Virtual Reality Review
This consumer virtual reality unit brings VR capabilities to last-gen consoles and the PC.

US, April 4, 2007 - Back in the mid-90s the future of gaming wasn't thought to be high-definition, or online communities, or massively multiplayer. It was freaking virtual reality baby! It would be easy to blame Hollywood for getting everyone worked up for technology that wasn't anywhere near ready, were it not for the fact that both Sega and Nintendo jumped on the bandwagon as fast as they could. While the Sega VR got canned early in its R&D, Nintendo actually went and delivered the Virtual Boy to a decidedly under whelmed public. After this rather dramatic failure, VR faded from the general public consciousness for almost a decade.Today we've actually got the technology that can make VR worthwhile, like solid 3D graphics processing and small, cheap LCDs. As such it's not much of a surprise that a variety of manufacturers had been developing a new generation of consumer VR. Trimersion is one such company.

IGN Gear first got to know Trimersion at E3 2006, with the company's silver bodysuit'ed booth babes drawing an ample crowd. Just short of a year later the company is ready for full release with a unit capable of working with the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC (with VGA to composite adapter, not included). An Xbox 360 dongle is apparently in development.

The Trimersion package consists of three components. The actual head-mounted-display (HMD) is a 1.2 pound unit that sports a pair of roughly 1-inch 320 x 240 resolution LCDs as well as head-tracking movement detection. Stereo headphones are incorporated into the unit, and an adjustable strap allows for a customized fit. The headset makes a wired connection to the gun peripheral, which contains the 4 AA batteries that power the HMD. The gun peripheral replaces the traditional control pad for whatever console is playing the game, and is arrayed with buttons that cover the various bases for each console's gamepad. The third component in the system is a base station that plugs into each console's controller ports (to make the gun peripheral work) and also accepts composite video inputs, which it wireless transmits to the HDM.The most obvious purpose for a VR peripheral in gaming is the FPS genre, and as such we conducted the majority of our testing with Halo 2 on the Xbox.

In our opinion, VR isn't really VR unless there is active head-tracking, and as such we focused our testing upon playing the game with the feature enabled. The Trimersion's head tracking system essentially takes over the role of the right analog stick in FPS titles, which means turning your head moves the aiming reticule and your general view. Actual character movement is handled by one of the forward mounted analog sticks on the gun peripheral.
Ideally a VR system detaches the player's view from where their gun is pointing, which allows for an expanded and immersive view without making the player have to aim with their head. Because the Trimersion is so modular a system and obviously can't retrofit VR-mods into console games, we had to learn how to aim with our faces. The process of doing so revealed some of the Trimersion's greatest weaknesses. Obviously, people's heads can't rotate 360-degrees, but in games where the view and where a character's body is facing are essentially connected, 360-degree spins are generally required. Pulling a 180 to see who's shooting you in the back is not an easy task with the Trimersion, as one can only really turn one's head perhaps 100-degrees. If you turn your head as far as you can and still can't see behind you, there's not much else to do since you'll eventually have to turn your own head straight, at which point you've got your back to the enemy once again. It is possible to spin a quick 180 with a sharp head jerk to the left or right, but it's not very exact, and will leave a user disoriented and scanning for the target. If you've ever wanted to know what it would be like to be a drunken Space Marine, this is it. Another big problem is the fact that the headtracking seems to have a bias towards looking down.

After a few minutes of use, most users end up with their chins on their chests, even though their character's view may be on the horizon. Fixing the skewed view requires staring at the sky and then slowly bringing one's head back to the horizon. It's something we found ourselves doing every few minutes. In games that incorporate effects like barrel-rise during automatic weapons firing a similar issue occurs, in that one must continually be turning one's head down to compensate for the view being forced upwards by the barrel rise. After a while one physically can't look down any more, at which point one must entirely disengage from combat to look at the sky and straighten things out.

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Info taken from IGN.com - Great Site - Check it out !